Dr. Who BBC Eighth Doctor 28 The Taking of Planet 5 (v1.0) # Simon Bucher Jones and Mark Clapham

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Twelve million years ago, a war touched the Earth briefly. Now, in Antarctica, an archaeological team has discovered the detritus of the

conflict. And it’s alive.

Twelve million years ago, a creature evolved that was capable of consuming all life in the universe. Now someone, or something, is

desperate enough to want to revive it.

Outside the ordered universe, things move. They’re hungry. And something has given them the scent of our space/time. In the far future, the Doctor has learnt of the war and feels he must intervene – but it’s more than just a local conflict of interest. One of the groups of combatants is from his own future, and the other has

never, ever, existed.

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THE TAKING OF PLANET 5

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Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd, Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane

London W12 0TT First published 1999

Original series broadcast on the BBC Format © BBC 1963

Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC ISBN 0 563 55585 8

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Sarah for putting up with nocturnal typing and daily zombification; Lawrence Miles for letting me loose on his creations fromAlien Bod-ies(yes, Iknowhe’d signed away the rights and couldn’t stop me but it’s nice to feel trusted by an author I admire); everyone at the Tavern who invites me to parties I never go to; my other friends for repeatedly asking when I’m going to write a proper book (I didn’t say I listened to them); and (of course) Mark for being a nifty writer and helping me out when it was clear that a more important project – my sec-ond daughter, Rhianna Linnea Bucher-Jones, who was born in April – wouldn’t let me do a solo book this year.

– SB-J

Dedicated to my fellow sufferers:

Marianna Adams, Rosie Hawes, Vanessa Hill, Emma McCarthy, Mike Redman, Sam Sanders and Jess Thomas. It’s been an experience. Thanks to Simon for letting me loose on his book; the Bloomsbury Lo-cal Group (Jon Miller, Jim Smith and Tat Wood) for advice and what-not; Lance Parkin for ‘being my Yoda’; Peter Siani-Davies for realising where my priorities lay; Rebecca Kneale for the Stacy anecdote; and all the rest of the author mafia (especially Jon Blum, Kate Orman and Lawrence Miles) for continuity discussions. May our critics soon sleep with the fishes. Thanks also to Mum, Dad, Sarah, Orlando, Emily Coles and Andrew Plummer.

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Some things are true everywhere. One of them is this. No society can endure for ever without at least one outsider.

There are reasons for this. One is essentially pragmatic. No ruling body can ever comprehend the most likely causes of its own destruc-tion. Power ossifies even before it corrupts. For the powerful too many things are both arbitrary and contingent. To be told that some-thing is beyond control becomes unthinkable. Rulers need outcasts to tell them what they can no longer see. Even if they kill the outcasts afterwards: they need them. Not that that’s any consolation to the outsiders, I expect, even if they get baked into a pie – as is the custom among the Androgums.

Then there are the forces of snobbery. These are not to be under-estimated. The singing squids of Anagonia nudge each other furtively when a tone-deaf sidles by banging its six muted gongs. The sessile stalagbats of Marinus affect not to notice the echo soundings of their cave-mouth-dwelling cousins. There are even stranger examples, but naturally I wouldn’t discuss them with people of your sort.

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Prologue

There was a place in Hell where skulls were the only ornaments, and the servants had no faces. Even from there he had been cast out. As a shadow of a shade he came to dwell at the edge of a certain abyss, in a tower built out of the bodies of those he had personally marked when he had been allowed in the dark councils of Mictlan. This hap-pened soon after the masters of the Celestial Intervention Agency, the Celestis, had pulled the doors of perception closed behind themselves lest their histories be unravelled in the war with the Time Lords’ future enemy, in the battles they had foreseen. They had put reality behind them like a bad dream and turned themselves into creatures built out of mythemes and the working of nanoscopic machine-demons. They had poisoned the walls of reality itself, until Mictlan had bubbled up into existence on its far side, a cyst of galled space-time cut off from the time winds. It was their glorious world of the dead.

The outcast had been young. In his opening speech to the Last Parliament – the grey and stifling government of Mictlan – he had, in passing, described the achievements of its building as ‘parasitic’ in operation. While accurate, it was perhaps that infelicity of expression that began his fall.

It may have been something else. He may have committed a social faux pasor perhaps a crime or a breach of some protocol or ruling. He never knew. The Celestis do not explain. They do not apologise. They turned their shadowy backs to him like cases of mummified beetles and drew away. He never heard another voice. The servants alone did not scorn him, but their husklike regard was worse than their master’s indifference. He realised he had already become less even than they.

Even so he found something to occupy him.

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He watched the endless sea of nothingness where universes pass and repass.

He did not remain alone for ever.

Of all the secrets, the child knew, the sea was the most hidden. It was hidden by custom rather than by walls or invisibility shields and the child had learned early that custom hid a multitude of sins. The sea had had no name and was shown on no maps. In whispers the damned called it the Invisible – or the Outer – Ocean.

When the exams and the cull were over, and the doors of the or-phanage had creaked open the width of a thin man to allow the blood of the unworthy to flow into the grey gunmetal gutters, the child, still aching from the pain of delivering the killing blows, would creep out, alone. It – no gender had yet been selected for it from the Wardrobes – had earned the privacy with the fury with which it had dealt out the fatal wounds. No one would stay to talk with such a one after the sluices had activated. Without companions then, it stalked, hunched over, into the night, up on to the promontory of spars and flotsam that edged the unacknowledged sea.

It was a serious crime. The Teachers in their hooded robes pre-tended not to know of the Invisible Ocean. Although their whole curriculum was dependent on the understanding of the Inland Sea – which some call the universe – and the exploitation of its inhabi-tants, the Other Sea, looking outward to the unknown, was beyond their claustrophobic world with its narrow universal walls.

The servants also ignored it. That did not surprise the child. The young of Hell, no less than their peers, viewed their servants in the same way as they might view a chair or a table. Servants were fur-niture: each a thing valuable only for its usefulness, or – perhaps – its beauty, whose only danger might lie in its deployment by others in some lethal or obscene practical joke. The other pupils, male and female, neuter and unformed, affected also to give it no mind, al-though it was clear that some at least knew of it. Once, a drawing of the Ocean had been found pinned to a submonitor (through the eye, killing the nasty little beast stone dead) and the whole scholarum had

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been put to the Kindly Question, but even then the reality of the Ocean had not been officially conceded. It was as if it simply were not there to the Masters, although its waves beat with persistence more terrible for its very mindlessness on the outermost walls of the orphanage it-self. One day, the child thought, one day soon all this will be washed away. It was as near to a prayer as any thought can be in Hell.

A hermit lived by the Invisible Ocean, if living described his bro-ken existence. He had somehow transgressed the strict rules that governed the doings of the Masters. What his crime had been, the child could barely imagine: speaking in Council with his face visible perhaps, or intoning without irony the Principles of Rassilon. The Masters were unforgiving. All praise to the Masters!

The hermit had been broken. Yet still some knowledge remained in him, and he alone – outside taboo, allowed to exist perhaps be-cause his sundering from the Masters gave him a sacred status beyond damnation – had studied the Invisible Ocean. Gradually he told the child all he knew about the things he had seen on the other side of that burning, bruise-dark sea.

One cold midnight, they watched together as one of the orbs that hung like phantom fruit high on the tree boughs of the night was devoured by something vast and strange. The old man had held a thin finger to his lips. ‘The Swimmers come and go,’ he said. ‘The Swimmers eat.’

The child’s eyes had been large with wonder, fear and darkness. ‘What do they eat, Master?’

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Chapter One

The City is of Night; perchance of Death, But certainly of Night; for never there

Can come the lucid morning’s fragrant breath After the dewy dawning’s cold grey air;

The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity; The sun has never visited that city,

For it dissolveth in the daylight fair

– The City of Dreadful Night James Thomson 1874

Painstakingly, gloved hand over gloved hand, Thomas Jessup climbed down the rope ladder into the cavern under the partly dismembered mountain range. It was perilous work. The ladder swung free of any wall, attached to the rim of a ten-foot hole in the ceiling, thirty feet up from the cavern floor. Don’t think about that, Jessup told himself. Don’t think about slick grapples coming loose, or snow boots failing to grip steel rungs. With some relief he found his boots making contact with solid rock.

There was no one around. The generator whirred away to itself, a deep self-satisfied whirr like a fat bee, surrounded by half-empty equipment cases. A series of linked sodium bulbs stretched away from the generator and down the tunnel, strung out like fairy lights.

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Ferdinand, already hard at work examining the walls of Site B. Site A had proved to be a dead end, a ragged pit – apparently bottom-less – that appeared to have been torn out under the subterranean ruins, whole levels of possible discoveries tumbling down into dark-ness. Schneider insisted that the damage had been done from below. It had given Jessup the creeps, but now he thought that Site B, with its promise of finds intact, may be worse.

The electric light illuminated only a small area, but the vastness of the structure was clear: an odd, rounded entranceway, artificially carved from local rock and inscribed with seemingly endless spirals of signs and pictograms. Ferdinand was concentrating on a ground-level strip of symbols, the old Venezuelan scribbling in a notebook, a wizened figure swamped by his bulky environment suit.

‘Cold out,’ said Jessup by way of conversation.

‘It’s Antarctica,’ Ferdinand replied eventually, too engrossed to no-tice any irony. ‘What do you expect?’

‘I expect the ice above our heads to crush us to death any time now,’ replied Jessup. ‘But that’s hardly the point. How’re things going there?’

Ferdinand shrugged, scraped his fingernails through his wispy grey beard.

‘Disturbing,’ he eventually replied. ‘The way these symbols are or-ganised, the whole five-pointedness of the arrays, seems to represent a radical approach to language structure, a whole different mindset to ours.’

‘To translators?’ asked Jessup facetiously.

‘To humans,’ replied Ferdinand, turning to fix Jessup with his pin-prick black eyes.

‘Oh,’ replied Jessup quietly. The UN had been expecting something like this, ever since the images from the orbital X-ray observatory, whose Earthward-pointing end-of-life calibration checks had been passed on by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, con-firmed that there was something there under the ice. Something large. Possibly something alien. Project Icepack had been sent in, hoping to find a nice little geological anomaly, perhaps evidence of an advanced

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form of igloo, then head straight back home.

Instead, within an hour of cracking through the ice and lowering themselves into the tunnel system, they had come across the ludi-crously ornate entranceway. An entrance obviously not designed for five- to six-foot-tall bipeds.

‘I hate all this Lara Croft bullshit,’ said Jessup.

‘Huh,’ snapped Ferdinand. ‘At least exploration’s your field. Most of my colleagues get to do their translations in their nice warm offices. Speaking of which. . . ’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’m off,’ replied Jessup. ‘Any idea where my fellow grave robber has got to?’

Ferdinand shrugged. ‘God’s gift to archaeology? Miss McCarthy does as she pleases, as well you should know. Schneider’s with the artefact, though.’

Jessup blinked. ’The what?’

Following Ferdinand’s directions, Jessup wandered down a few corri-dors. Air shafts and crawl spaces twisted off from the larger tunnels, the wind whistling through them in disconcerting fashion. The lesser passages weren’t built to the same scale as the massive corridors and Jessup wondered if they had been used by a different type of creature: to judge from the insane twirlings and grooved to-ing and fro-ing of the side tunnels, anything that had found them comfortable would have been very odd indeed. Sickeningly odd.

Jessup tried to ignore the noise of the wind. Above their heads it was subtracting a hellish ten degrees from the baseline minus eighty-seven degrees of the Antarctic winter. By night it may be minus a hundred degrees Fahrenheit out there.

The eye-bending friezes carved into most of the walls seemed to mock his frailty. According to initial tests on the microfractures in the material, they had to be between ten and twenty million years old. They were going to last for ever. He felt he might just see out the week.

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couldn’t find a better word for it himself. He sure as hell had never seen anything like it before.

It stood on an obviously custom-built stone plinth. Its base was an intricately patterned box made from some unearthly, blue-tinged metal. Oily pink flashes occasionally drifted across its polished sur-faces. Sprouting from the top was an ovoid, glassy black object – a lens? – in which amorphous shapes seemed to reside. The ovoid was attached to the box by what seemed like fingers of bone, reaching up to clasp the ovoid in place. In all, it must have been five foot tall. The globe itself was about the diameter of an American football helmet.

‘Don’t even ask,’ said Schneider, the group’s Valkyrie-esque leader. She had been with EDICT for years, working on the potential threat from millennial death cults. Rumour had it her work was so impres-sive she had been offered the chance to come across and play with the big toys. She was currently setting up a digital camera, adjusting the light to get the best perspective on the artefact. No matter how she adjusted the lamps, the damn thing seemed to absorb it, swathed in gloom.

‘What’s the latest from the geosat guys?’ Schneider asked, frowning at the artefact as if it were a wriggling child refusing to co-operate with a school photographer.

Jessup shrugged. ‘Not much. They’re still thinking the unthinkable, that there was some kind of mountain range here once, and it was levelled by a –’

He was cut off by McCarthy bursting into the room. The plump American’s face was even redder than usual as she grabbed Jessup’s hand. Her blue eyes were tripped-out wide. Her head jiggled, simul-taneously trying to address both him and Schneider.

‘You gotta see this,’ she croaked, short of breath. ‘You just gotta see it.’

Before he could complain, Jessup found McCarthy’s grip on his hand tightening, and she was dragging him down the corridor. They were moving away from Site A, deeper into the outlying ‘city’. There were no lights here, so McCarthy led them by torchlight. Jessup could hear Schneider muttering to herself as she followed close

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hind, stumbling as she tried to keep pace with McCarthy. As they pro-ceeded through the dark, only the wildly swinging beam of McCarthy’s torch to give any indication of their surroundings, Jessup found him-self feeling the urge to turn back, to run. He tried to ignore it as he was dragged onward through a zigzag of similar tunnels.

DESPAIR. Kittens scrabbling at the black sack interior as the water rises, blood and fur clogging in the pitch-dark waters under the ice. The taste of blood, iron-strong.

What was that? Jessup found himself trying to break McCarthy’s grip, but the American was nothing if not a sturdy country gal.

DESPAIR. ENDLESS AGONY. The rack, the iron maiden, the re-sensitisation of nerves worn down with pain. The anti-endorphins in the sealed laboratory. Room 101. Room 101.2. The fact that radiation is measured in Grays. The false memories of a thousand abductees.

Thomas Jessup had always been sensitive to these things. That was why UNIT chose him. That was why he wanted to run, while neither of his companions noticed a thing out of place. Trapped between Mc-Carthy and Schneider in the narrowing tunnels – surely they couldn’t be claustrophobic: hadn’t they been built for things larger than hu-mans? – he couldn’t escape. The images themselves did not make any sense, or possibly they made too much. Things he had seen done, things he had been forced to confront or imagine on other missions. His own prepackaged frozen albatrosses.

DESPAIR. LONELINESS. ABANDONED. The door closing. Mothers face angry and pinched in the final narrowing gap of light. The sounds from the other room. Over and over and over. A bamboo cane striking flesh.

Christ, that wasn’t his memory. Someone had had a rough child-hood.

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whose presence McCarthy had dragged him into. Fifteen feet wide, a creature of raw stuff, pitch-black flesh impenetrable to the rough sodium light. A maw, a void. The mouth that eats itself for ever. The word for agony made flesh. Jessup keeled over in its presence, the thing’s eternal pain flooding his mind. This time he got a taste of its images.

The tormentors. The stiff-necked, narrow ones. The war between the aeons. The sundering between the moments, seconds eating away like mouths.

For want of something better to do, they had been reading the litera-ture while they waited: Fitz slouched against a giant cactuslike pillar that seemed to have been designed as a yak’s back-scratcher, and Com-passion constantly pacing. Fitz wasn’t sure what he had expected; the Wallachians were humanoid – not like the human colonists he’d met on the other future worlds the Doctor had taken him to, but not like monsters either. Realaliens. And they looked like men with slightly dodgy make-up. Blue eye shadow and warty heads aside, they had been as unhelpful as anyone when the Doctor had turned out to want to see everything on a budget of only thirty walloons a day. A wal-loon was the smallest Wallachian coin in existence – worth about a farthing, Fitz thought.

Waiting rooms were alike everywhere. True, the leaflets were self-sustaining patterns of 3-D light that the Doctor called holograms, and the wire racks looked like fountains or orchids, but that didn’t stop it being basically a room dedicated to getting people out and about to fertilise the local economy with big spadefuls of cash.

Compassion had swept the room once with her most disdainful gaze, before picking at the holograms as if she were picking the petals off flowers, or legs off spiders. She waved one vaguely in Fitz’s direc-tion. ‘Can you see the sense in this?’

Fitz watched the holofield reshape itself, and felt an entirely un-wanted blush creeping up around his collar. He grabbed the flickering floating handkerchief of light and shoved it in a pocket. ‘I think I’d bet-ter study that properly hack in the TARDIS.’ He managed a sardonic

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shrug. ‘From their pose it’s probably an advert for Vick’s vapour rub, but I’m going to have fun finding out if it’s audience participation. If we’re going to be at the Second Wallachian Exhibition, as long as the Doctor wants we may as well start stocking up on things to see.’

Compassion shrugged. No small talk, that was her problem. Re-mote in every sense of the word. Fitz absently stroked the side of his nose with a finger. He was itching for a cigarette – the urge seemed to have picked up again – but the stylised syringe on the wall, shot through with a threatening purple lightning bolt, suggested that the Wallachians frowned on stimulants. Unless they sold them, of course. He wished he had had time to change. True, they hadn’t seen any-one yet in anything but basic bureaucratic gear – all pinstriped tabards and chrome bowlers – but, judging by the scarlet and silver decor, any second the cast ofFlash Gordon’s Trip to Mars were going to saunter by and he was going to look like a fool still wearing the faded sixties outfit he had reverted to for comfort before the Doctor had pulled this unexpected pit stop. He had been pillaging the TARDIS wardrobes for a while, as if dress sense were the only sense he could make of things, but finally the familiar had overwhelmed him as if it were a kind of uniform. Mr Out-Of-Place First Class.

By contrast, Compassion looked – as always – as if she owned the place, or as if she might be heading a consortium dedicated to tearing it down and putting up something else. Something from elsewhere. Something alien. In a sense she was as human as he was, but it was at least a sixth sense. She was on the edge of human. She was attractive; hair dark red, well-built in a muscular rather than a sexy way, but still with enough curvature to make an archimandrite kick a hole in a stained-glass window. Particularly in the black cocktail dress she had found somewhere in the TARDIS wardrobes. Fitz smiled. Maybe one day. If he was very drunk. And if she’d had a personality transplant.

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or upset, he decided. She wasn’t peeved, or displeased, or put upon – all of which might well describe his feelings. She just honestly didn’t care – or perhaps she cared in ways he couldn’t fathom. So lacking, as usual, any key to turn, any path to follow, any way to reach her, he shrugged and took refuge inside his own thoughts. Her dark eyes watched and her lips moved, and someone very strong was at home inside her head, but Fitz increasingly didn’t know who. It made it worse that he had once, in a sense, known her extremely well. Once he had taken her orders, but that had been another him. He had been separated from the Doctor.

Lost on her remote world, which, while it had been of Earth origin, had also been raised to a pattern set by Faction Paradox, the militant voodoo hippies from beyond time. There he had died and been re-membered by Compassion’s people. As he had been rere-membered, so he had been reborn by their technologies. Not once, but many times, and the end result of that chain of memories had worked with her, until the Doctor had caught up with the program, and the TARDIS had remembered Fitz back the way he had been originally.

He didn’t remember much of their time as the Doctor’s – there was no nice way to say it – enemies. Not that the Doctor had ever referred to it again of course, but he guessed that Compassion understood things in him that he didn’t know himself any more: possibly just distorted things, maybe true ones. It made her creepy. Creepier. Did she resent losing authority over him? Did she resent losing him? Had she had him? Had he had her? God, it was complicated.

He hadn’t seen much of her during that business with the Enclave and the fit Time Lady, hadn’t been sure he’d wanted to, and the pace of events had swept them apart anyway. Now they were back together and he didn’t know how to talk to her. He missed Sam; either Sam, any Sam.

Compassion’s silence was getting on his nerves. He gestured. A grand wave of his arms like a mad guitar player, taking in the lumi-nous statues, the hologram-bearing orchids, the giant plaster ducks fixed in midair by, he guessed, the appliance of science.

‘Who can say, my pretty one?’ he leered. It wasn’t a serious leer

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– hell, he’d run a mile – but it never hurt to get some practice in. ‘Perhaps the artists are followers of the Dadaist movement. Perhaps they’re flinging paint in the faces not of their audience but of reality itself. Surely not even the sinister paintings of Pickman or Martinique himself ever held so sublime a shudder!’ He wondered where he had got the name Pickman from – it had just popped on to his tongue.

‘And more than their eyes followed you round the room,’ the Doctor added stepping round from the other side of the row of black mono-lithic autotenders that ran along the chamber’s far wall like displaced dominoes. He was carrying three 99s. Ice cream had dribbled on his bottle-green velvet sleeves. ‘Get Fitz to tell you about the Vega Affair properly sometime. It was a singularly gruesome business.’

‘No doubt you intervened at some moment of planetary calamity,’ Compassion said, raising dark eyes to the false heavens of the ceiling. Ordinarily, with anyone ordinary, Fitz would have been inclined to pick up on that. To answer that yes, the Doctor and in all modesty Fitz himself had done their hit, and that the peoples of several worlds had owed their continued sleep and well-being to their masterly grasp of interstellar diplomacy; poker, shove-ha’penny and basic art criticism. He didn’t do that often with Compassion, though. What would have been the point?

‘It is almost certain that everyone involved would have solved their own problems without your assistance,’ Compassion continued, ‘and if they did not it is certain that it would not have mattered. Still, if it amused you. . . ’

The Doctor looked stung. He leaned closer to Compassion and thrust an ice cream at her, flipping Fitz one at the same time. Fitz fumbled the catch, and it fell on the floor. The Doctor offered his, but Compassion got in first and closed Fitz’s hand round her cornet, a small, possibly relieved, smile flitting over her – currently – bee-stung lips. Oblivious to this possible by-play, the Doctor had meanwhile taken a mouthful of chocolate, and having fished in his breast pocket was brandishing three golden tickets with his other hand. His hair bounced like something from a shampoo commercial.

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to realise how much he was coming to depend on him – Fitz could have done without his being such a blatant bird-puller. And the hor-ror and the shame of that was even greater when he confronted the evident fact that the Doctor didn’t even seem to notice. Still, he was pleased to see it didn’t work on Compassion. Not obviously anyway. If she was turned on to the Doctor’s proximity she wasn’t showing it.

‘Now this is what I call amusing.’ The Doctor beamed. ‘Professor Mildeo Twisknadine’s Wandering Museum of the Verifiably Phantas-magoric. Also known as the Museum of Things That Don’t Exist. I’ve been trying to catch up with these people for some time. They’ve made a special study of the mythic, the outré and the rum. With the Enclave up in smoke, if anyone can suggest a backway into the Ob-verse, they should be able to.’

‘You really want to go back?’ Fitz asked, remembering the icy terror of the plains, and the ruined shards of glass that had rained down when war came to that peculiar little crystal city.

‘He doesn’t like to be thwarted,’ Compassion said. ‘You must see how it would annoy him to have to bow to destiny.’ Her voice was slightly too cold for humour.

‘Destiny, my dear Compassion, is the art of throwing darts at ran-dom and claiming that anything you hit was the target all along,’ the Doctor said. ‘I suppose I just can’t bear to leave a story unfinished, still less a universe unexplored.’

‘Gnomic,’ Fitz muttered, ‘brilliant.’ But his spirits lifted as he imag-ined other reasons for the Doctor’s interest. ‘They’re up to something then. A crime’ He stared round at the neonlike walls of the chamber as if expecting a bunch of ruffians to jump out of them, and lowered his voice. ‘Smuggling dope, or gun-running.’ His face brightened. ‘White slavery!’

The Doctor combined shock and disapproval in one thunderous but brief expression, before reverting to his normal state of twice human enthusiasm.

‘Oh no, nothing like that. At least, I don’t think so. Honestly, any-one would think I spent all my time looking for trouble. There’s quite enough mistrust in any universe without going around suspecting

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ple of things. Sufficient unto the day is the burden thereof, Fitz.’ Fitz sighed. ‘So what is this Mildew Twistknacker’s Museum about, when it’s at home? We can’t make any sense of these leaflets.’

‘Why, my boy,’ a strange voice boomed, and, as if by magic, a man appeared behind them. ‘It is quite simply the plenum’s premier peri-patetic plenitude of potentially possible parafactology, and I have the honour to be none other than –’ the plump little man’s eyes gleamed – ‘Mildew Twistknacker himself, so I ought to know.’

Turning, Fitz saw a rotund bear of a man, flashing tortoiseshell shirt split open to show chest hair braided into a thousand pleats. The man’s face, too, was covered in hair, so that he resembled a botanist looking through foliage, but his eyes were icy circles of scarlet, pierc-ingly, frighteningly alert and interested. Fitz felt an all too familiar embarrassment threatening. He opted for bluff and manly certitude.

‘No offence, Professor: probably a common enough name where you hail from, but sadly a tongue-twister to my humble language translator.’ He had seen such things in use a few times – to complete his gambit he made a burbling sound between his teeth, and poked at his pocket, deliberately mumbling a few random verbs. Right, sorted. Sadly, his explanation fell on deaf ears, for the professor and the Doctor were too busy clapping each other on the back, and name-dropping third parties. They were, Fitz gathered, both friends (pos-sibly, in the case of Mildeo, a rival) of someone called Vorg the Mag-nificent. Professor Mildeo claimed to have known him when he went by the name of Vorg the Adequate – ‘and that was a gross extension of his capacities into the realm of hyperbole’ – while the Doctor con-fided that he had last encountered the other showman trying to sell crustacoid pornography to the bemused unicellular life forms of Van Madden’s Star.

‘What’, Compassion asked, ‘is parafactology?’

The Doctor opened his mouth to explain, but glanced sideways at the self-proclaimed professor first and, as if in acknowledgment of his evident eagerness, waved a hand for the man to continue.

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(both common and rare), and the twelve catalogued kinds of baffle-gap. We also have a small department dealing solely with technoba-bble, but that is rather new and will not be a serious discipline until another thousand years or so have passed. By studying the limits of the possible, by examining the things people choose to believe in the face of the absence of disproof, we can map the domain of the real, and –’ he bowed as if expecting applause, ‘thereby transcend it!’

The Doctor grinned. ‘Splendid. I couldn’t have put it half so well. I’m ever so pleased to have caught you. My friends and I would love a tour, and I have one or two special fakes and oddments aboard my ship so I’ve been meaning to drop in to see your collection ever since I first heard about it. Tell me, have you got a South American Missing Link? I have a bund forgery somewhere.’

‘No, but I’ve got nine types of Yeti, including the robotic and the fungi varieties – perhaps we could swap!’

Fitz looked at Compassion. Compassion looked at Fitz. Perhaps some things did transcend all cultural barriers, bind together the di-vergent strata of the mind’s metaphorical tectonics. It looked like being a long tour. A very long, boring tour.

Actually the museum was a surprise. It was serious, even imposing, from the outside, a hymn in marble and gold – although Mildeo’s mannerisms had led Fitz to expect a cross between a gypsy caravan and the nine boxes of knickknacks he had kept at the back of his flat, waiting for his mum to get better. Presumably they were still there, if the landlord hadn’t tipped them out for the bin men.

The museum also looked utterly immobile and about as peripatetic as the Empire State Building. Fitz stopped himself asking how it got from world to world. He knew from experience that the Doctor would say something like, ‘Well it emfoozles via the ephasmotic metahedron’ – and he’d just have to nod as if he had understood. Sod it! He’d just take it as read for once.

Mildeo saw his look, but mistook it for architectural interest. ‘It’s modelled on the temple of Zeus, one of the seven wonders of An-cient Earth. Specifically chosen because the best reconstructions

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made up to the mid-twenty-ninth century were conclusively proved by zigmaphotography to be completely wrong.’

‘So this is based on the latest findings,’ Compassion said.

‘Oh no. The earlier ones, naturally. All the worst bits. We’re very interested in certainty. Particularly when it’s mistaken.’

After that Fitz really started enjoying himself, and it may have been his imagination, but he thought Compassion was unbending just a little. Perhaps she went for hairy men.

The planetarium was an especial hit.

‘Here’, Mildeo intoned proudly, ‘we have the entirety of the Solar sys-tem. Vulcan of course, nearest to the sun – as detected wrongly in 1880, disproved by Einstein, and then deliciously discovered again in 2003, only to vanish by 2130.’ He waved his plump, hairy fists around like an excited Homo habilis. ‘Mercury,’ he continued, ‘one side always facing the sun, onward through jungled Venus – note the stuffedVenusaurus erectus– Mars with its canals, and stilt cities.’

‘The tyrannical natives of North Polar Jupiter,’ the Doctor joined in excitedly, ‘the caroming worlds of Velikowsky, and the Black Star Nemesis. The Five Outer Worlds named after the lowest circles of Dante’s Hell.’ The Doctor, Fitz thought, had forgotten all about the Obverse in his sudden surge of boyish enthusiasm.

Compassion was peering at the model of Earth. ‘Hyperborea, Mu, Atlantis, Hy-Brasilica, Antilles.’ She shook her head. ‘Meaningless, I’m afraid.’

‘Ah, no. Wrong, perhaps, but meaningful, I must insist. Press the red button, my dear,’ Mildeo added, ‘and the interior of Pellucidar-Symlandia will unfold itself.’ It did, and they were able to see the minute mysteries of the interior. Someone on Mildeo’s staff was an excellent model maker. One of the minuscule dinosaurs waved cheer-fully. Fitz started pointing out the volcanoes but the Doctor had bounded on to another exhibit.

‘Oh dear.’ The Doctor sounded disappointed by something. He was examining a planet between Mars and the verdant Jupiter.

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an imposing man in early middle age, talking about it onThe Sky at Night. The planets seemed roughly to follow a law that meant each successive world was about twice as far out as its predecessor from the sun. Except that between Mars and Jupiter the gap was more like six times, as if a world had gone astray. For a while there had been a theory that a world had shattered there, making up the asteroid belt, but in time it had been disproved. The perturbing gravity of Jupiter had simply prevented anything forming there beyond the size of the largest of the asteroids, Ceres.

‘Is something the matter, Doctor?’ Mildeo asked. ‘I acknowledge that our Thyrop-Minerva is less detailed than the other worlds but we simply have less to go on. It wasn’t believable for as long. The mythology lacked time to accrete.’

‘I’m sorry, Mildeo,’ the Doctor said heavily. ‘Perhaps you ought to sit down. I know this will be a blow, but there really was a planet between Mars and Jupiter. This isn’t untrue – not in the essentials anyway.’

Mildeo winced. ‘Don’t tell me. Anotherreal item. It’s such an em-barrassment when that happens. I’m only allowed to include Vulcan because it wasn’t real when people thought it was, and one of our sponsors thinks it was invented by Star Trek.’ He took in Fitz’s and Compassion’s bemused expressions. ‘I take it your friends aren’t into the classics. Still, who is?’ A glum expression made a brief attempt to machete its way out of his beard. ‘I’ll have to call a staff meeting. They won’t like it. That makes the second case of our displaying a “real” item this year. We do our best but it’s very difficult to authoritatively inauthenticate a display.’

‘I can see it must be,’ Fitz said lightly. ‘What was the other one? Merlin turn up, did he, to verify the Once and Future King?’

Mildeo sniffed. ‘Worse. It was one of our best exhibits. See the Antarctic Elder Things – truer than life, and twice as eldritch.’

Before Fitz or even Compassion could react, the Doctor’s face was inches from Mildeo’s, and his hands were fixed in the professor’s tor-toiseshell lapels.

‘Someone verified what?’ he shouted.

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∗ ∗ ∗

Change was good, Xenaria repeated to herself, as she waited for the pain to rip through her body. They had been taught that mantra at the Academy, she and the rest of the strike force. They had been taught it with techniques that embossed it directly on to the brain like the most annoying tune in the world, like the bit of doggerel poetry that never dislodges.

Change was good, was one slogan. Local situations needed local mea-sureswas another. That didn’t make it any easier. Their last mission had been a sabotage run in an aquatic environment, and they had gone in as armour-plated, crablike creatures. Xenaria had grown used to walking sideways and breathing water, but there was little point in nostalgia. Soon she would be altered into a new battle form, her flesh glowing white as the crusty plating gave way to a new, more appro-priate shape.

Change is good, they had told her. Any soldier curses when they hear that.

Change can kill you. So can suicide missions.

The mission target was located at one of the planet’s poles – an isolated community, possibly a scientific base; the briefing had been imprecise on that point. Command had arranged for the site to be sur-veyed by a cloaked orbital satellite, and for its data to be diagrammed directly into the strike force’s hindbrains. When Xenaria blinked she could see colour-coded corridors printed like bruises on her retina. The maps were blood-vessel blurry, and floaters of loose optic tissue drifted along them like clouds in the orange skies of her dreams. It would not be long now before she was blind in that eye. It was a necessary side effect.

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implied.

A pain – fierce as a fire – shot through her, as the drugs and de-vices that were resculpting her body forced her towards the point of death. As it approached she wondered if this was how the current inhabitants of the base would feel, facing a force they could not hope to understand, even if it had been inclined to give them time to try.

So be it. It was war. The moment had been prepared for.

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Chapter Two

He was there when the office was due to open – 9.15 a.m., 1 October 1999 – an early start for Buenos Aires. A tall lean man, whose frayed nerves looked to be nearly outside his skin. At 9.17 he had hunched in his black worn coat against the sky-blue wall of the barrio and smoked three cigarillos in succession. By 9.20 he had paced the narrow street a good dozen times. The office’s entrance was nothing special to look at: a brass plate in Flemish (a language deliberately chosen for its lack of local use) on a thick wood door identified it as a part of the United Nations Pantographic Survey (South American Section). Actually it was a front for the Intelligence task-force section of the organisation; the door was an MDF laminate over reinforced armour, and a dozen pinhead cameras covered the street outside from sufficient angles to cover any avenue of attack.

Frances Muerte, the duty receptionist, had been watching the man since he came within range of the monitors. She had put off any action in the hope that one of the field agents – preferably one of the more muscular ones – would have reported in early. She even considered paging security, even though she was still angry with Capitano Esparza after last night. She wondered if the marks of her slap still showed on his fat silly face.

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∗ ∗ ∗

Capitano Julian Esparza had regarded the posting to Buenos Aires as a welcome chance to exercise authority in his own country, a small reward for faithful service across the global theatre. He had been sickened to find that so much had changed. Buenos Aires was a sick city in these latter days, he felt, a city obsessed with psychoanalysis and drunk on caffeine. The Italianate streets of La Boca that he had grown up in were full of fags and yuppies these days.

The waiting was setting his nerves on edge, but he was damned if he would go out into the city to sip designer coffee in the stainless-steel bars that had sucked the life out of La Boca. He was waiting for the police, his own agents and anyone else he had managed to get hold of to report back in. His station covered Latin America, but, with the current focus on the Middle East and the Balkans drawing resources from around the world, he was working backup down to the bottom of the world. He was running errands for Geneva.

Geneva had demanded that he look after an academic on a lecture tour of South America who should just have commenced the first of two projected weeks at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires. He was an occasional UNIT adviser, and Geneva liked to keep track of such people. For Esparza it was a babysitting job, dull but easy. Except, of course, the man had gone missing. Abducted, possibly, by aliens with no taste. Now half the city was out looking for him, and if they failed, Geneva would want to know why.

He clicked through the video footage he had pulled from the net for the third time that hour. Surely the professor had been fatter than that, the last time? Perhaps coffee was a good idea. The close-ups were blurring before his eyes like acid spilled on negatives. The text was like islands of certainty in the haze. Credentials good, but nothing special, a typical academic – by all accounts a respectable, even worthy individual. So far, the only sighting that could be relied upon had put the man in the heart of the red-light district, cadging beer and telling fortunes. At one in the morning, under the neon glare of a sign shaped like a woman, he had reportedly been shouting abuse at the sky in classical Spanish. Something in the line of planets,

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Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter and Saturn, slung like cheap lights in a bar across the north, had upset him. Sober, his listeners had been unable to say what it was. One had called him possessed.

A notation on the file showed a delta-class psionic rating. Esparza didn’t remember seeing that before – perhaps it explained the carry-on. Slamming his chair against the desk with almost vicious inten-sity, Esparza strode out of his office and into the main reception area. Surely the field agents would have reported something to the Muerte bitch.

He found a man, laying her head down tenderly on her desk, a long finger pressed to his lips. As Esparza entered, his hand falling on the butt of his service revolver, the man straightened up and said, without turning round, ‘Good morning, El Capitano Julian. You may call me Professor Nathaniel Hume. I believe you wanted to see me. I’m afraid we don’t have long – I expect you’ll be getting a message in about twenty minutes. Project Icepack will be requiring my services.’ The man, whose midnight-blue, staring eyes Esparza recognised from the files, sat down on the edge of the desk. To his own surprise Esparza found himself adopting a similar position, waiting for the message to come.

Twitching, slightly – couldn’t the others see the impact the thing had had on him? – Jessup leaned in closer. Were the other team members sensitive at all? Were they even alive? Did anything insensitive to this kind of pain even deserve to be alive? Were they zombies, the people round him? The walking dead at the End of the World? Then he saw the sweat on Schneider’s brow, the tremor in her hands. Thank God. If she felt it, then there was hope.

The creature pulsated before them, unearthly whispers coming from within its shifting mass. ‘What is it?’ Schneider asked, her voice strained.

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identification. Still, he had a better handle on it now. Now that he’d seen that Schneider too was afraid.

‘Abused, subservient,’ said Jessup, carelessly wiping vomit from his mouth with the back of one gloved hand. ‘Good and faithful servant.’ His entire body still shook from the waves of despair radiating from the creature. ‘Lost, deserted and betrayed. Left alone, endless torture. The last shall be first and the first last.’

‘Yes, yes, we’ve been through that ourselves.’ Schneider sighed. ‘I can feel it too, though thankfully not as strongly as you seem to. Anything else?’

Jessup frowned, puzzlement briefly overtaking unease. ‘A new feel-ing,’ he said tentatively. ‘Communion, loss of control, a feeling of losing hold of someone close –’

Jessup was cut off in mid-sentence by a vast convulsion rippling through the creature. All three humans jumped back, alarmed. The thing expanded wildly, amorphous limbs thrashing outward, inner flesh curving and swirling, forming some kind of orifice. Beyond that could be seen eternity, endless space and an infinity of colours. Colours wild and impossible: colours out of space.

‘Losing hold,’ barked Jessup, stumbling away from the thing. A shape was flung out of the creature’s exposed inner spaces, hitting the ground and rolling limply across the tiled floor. The sodium bulbs exploded, leaving the creature’s weird innards the only source of light. Then the creature folded back in on itself, closing the opening.

Jessup felt the creature’s thoughts calm slightly, as if it was, for the moment at least, emotionally exhausted. The hollow emptiness left when its fear faded from his mind was almost as bad as the despair had been. There was a power to the feelings that might be addictive. He would have to watch that.

They flicked their torches on, and Jessup saw Schneider running across to the dark, huddled shape on the floor, while visibly trying to keep a safe distance from the dormant creature. McCarthy ran across to join her, but Jessup didn’t really have the energy. He heard Schneider swear, all harsh Nordic consonants. McCarthy gasped.

‘A girl,’ said Schneider, seemingly to convince herself. Bruised,

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conscious, but still breathing. McCarthy, get back to the surface ASAP. Get on the sat-phone and tell base we need backup.’

Jessup saw McCarthy’s torch beam jiggle around as she ran out of the room. He staggered over to Schneider, who was absently stroking the girl’s head. Schneider’s impassive eyes were narrow in the dim light as she looked at the unconscious figure.

‘How the hell did you get here?’ she asked.

The message had come, of course, Geneva demanding the services of the man Esparza hoped they never realised had been missing. His re-lief stopped him from even caring how Hume had known in advance. ‘I don’t regret the lectures, of course,’ Hume said waspishly as Esparza struggled to slam the door of the military transport plane against the wind. ‘No matter how much I’d have tried to keep them essentially philological in nature. They would have to have been couched at the level of the audience.’

‘Yeah, right,’ Esparza said, adding, ‘as the Americans say’ under his breath. Thank God he wasn’t going. He didn’t know what Hume would make of the things the team had found under the ice, or what the team would make of him, but he wished them all the very best of each other. The liver and the lights. The soft muscle tissue and the hot red blood. God that was a gruesome thought. What pit of the unconscious did that crawl out of? He needed sleep. Everyone’s thoughts seemed on edge these days.

When the plane had lifted off from the end of the runway he watched it dwindle away heading south along the coast, and cursed under his breath.

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front end. Chipped plaster and yellowed paintwork were still the or-der of the day for staff.

They passed through a room where a line of scholarly, wide-eyed creatures were restoring ancient parchments.

‘Correspondence sent to 221B Baker Street,’ explained Mildeo. ‘The nonexistent address of the entirely fictional Sherlock Holmes. A fine example of the powerful reality of the utterly unreal.’

The Doctor stared at his shoes, hands stuffed in his pockets as if trying to bottle in some vital revelation. ‘Could we be getting to the point, please?’ he asked uneasily.

‘Of course, my dear fellow, of course,’ replied Mildeo, bustling them through a pair of cracked double doors. ‘Always such a hurry with you, isn’t it? These creatures have not been with us for millions of years. I hardly see the need to rush now.’

The Doctor grimaced sulkily. ‘I had enough problems with unspeak-able and ancient whatsits from the dawn of forever in my last incar-nation,’ he said wearily ‘I rather hoped to have put all that behind me. Got them all tucked up safe again, poor dears.’

They turned a corner.

‘Well, Doctor,’ Mildeo said, a semblance of pride creeping back into his voice. ‘What do you think?’

The statue stood about eleven feet high and was made of a dull lead-coloured material. Fitz prodded it surreptitiously. He was right. It was the same lead alloy they used for model soldiers, no doubt sup-ported on an internal armature. So that was all OK. All reasonable. Now all he had to deal with was what it looked like. Its central body was basically an upright cylinder, but ridged and distorted so that it looked organic and alive. Why on Earth it should be so disturbing for a statue of a living thing tolookliving Fitz couldn’t imagine, but the feeling was there. The cylinder rested on five long tentacles, which ended in flat veined triangular feet. Its ‘head’ was a smaller five-pointed star, all eyes and smaller tentacles and sucking mouths. Five arms, ropy, limp things hung from the middle of its body each divid-ing and subdividdivid-ing into finer fibres, and from its ‘sides’ black batlike wings were furled like tight umbrellas.

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The Doctor grabbed some boxes from around the exhibit and stacked them quickly, climbing up for a better look. He pulled one of the wings out and stared down the end of its central support struc-ture, which looked as hollow as bamboo. ‘Good model work. The prothallus spore-cases are clearly visible.’

‘That’s a vegetable?’ Compassion said. ‘Its world must have had some seriously tough vegetarians to evolve that.’

‘It isn’t the product of evolution,’ the Doctor snapped. ‘That’s the problem.’ He pointed at a metal scroll on the base of the statue. “Old One, a.k.a. Elder Thing. Source: H.P. Lovecraft’sAt the Mountains of Madness, first pub. Astounding Stories, February–April 1936. Widely regarded as real by twenty-fifth-century fringe archaeologists, partic-ularly Bendecker, Vildson and Urnst.” It.’ Space of a heartbeat. ‘Isn’t.’ Space of a second heartbeat ‘Real.’

Fitz wondered why it mattered so much, but he wasn’t about to ask, not with the Doctor in one of his energetic moods. It would be like getting in the way of a tornado. It could wait.

‘So,’ said the Doctor, fixing Mildeo with his glittering eye. ‘What have you got that says different?’

Ten minutes later they arrived in an archive of some kind, shelves stretching out into the distance, all stacked high with diverse manners of tapes, reels, discs and other methods of data storage. The room was overstocked and a little cramped, so Fitz found himself nose to nose with a pickled alien foetus in a jar. Its almond-shaped eyes stared blankly into his.

‘Yeurgh!’ he exclaimed, backing away hastily and bumping into Mildeo.

Mildeo sighed, picking up the jar gently. ‘There was a time when people believed things like this were hidden everywhere,’ he ex-plained. ‘We haven’t displayed this fellow since the Archaic Paranoia exhibition a few years back.’

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Humanian Era. The first four are a little disappointing but believe me, the other six are well worth your attention.’

The Doctor balanced the tapes in one hand. They were only a few inches long, of a kind Fitz had seen tourists use in San Francisco.

‘So,’ said the Doctor, ‘any chance of popcorn?’

Mildeo hadn’t provided any popcorn, but he had found them a quiet corner in which to sit and examine the evidence. The Doctor, Fitz and Compassion crowded around a simple data screen as Mildeo struggled to get his equipment to accept the first tape. Fitz noticed Compassion’s demeanour change as they waited for the show to start, her attention fixed on the screen, and her usual indifferent manner giving way to a quiet intensity.

Waiting for the signals, thought Fitz.

‘Gotcha!’ exclaimed Mildeo, and the screen crackled into life. The recordings were of surprisingly high quality, considering their great age. The date – ‘10.1.99’ – flickered in the corner of the picture. The initial images were a blurry mess of what seemed like cave walls.

The camera spun around – it was clearly hand-held – to shakily point at a rather fierce looking blonde woman.

‘Professor Mary Schneider reporting for Project Icepack,’ she said in a European accent Fitz couldn’t quite place. ‘We are proceeding to Site B, after concluding that Site A has been too badly damaged to yield primary data.’

A map held up by another parka’d figure showed that the central area of the map had been cross-hatched out and marked with an A. B was round the edge. Something had rubbed out the heart of their find before they could even get to it. Fitz guessed they felt gutted.

They watched on as Schneider and her team examined an entrance-way clearly not built for human use. The Doctor peered intently at the screen, muttering as he tried to read the inscriptions on the walls.

‘Boring,’ said Compassion flatly. ‘Boring, and uninformative. Time to fast-forward.’

Reluctantly, the Doctor agreed. Mildeo skimmed through the mate-rial until something caught the Doctor’s eye.

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‘Stop!’ he exclaimed, bouncing on his seat. ‘Yes, back a bit. There.’ They were looking at what seemed, to Fitz’s eyes, like an unremark-ableobjet d’art, a big black Easter egg stuck to a metal box. Perhaps it was more impressive in real life; Schneider’s team certainly seemed taken aback by it.

‘I’ve seen that thing before,’ said the Doctor, stroking his top lip meditatively. ‘And I’m sure it has got nothing to do with Elder Things, real or fictional. You’re an expert on these oddities, Mildeo. What can you tell me about it?’

Mildeo peered at the screen with academic scrutiny, and stroked his lavish heard. ‘It’s ugly,’ he announced authoritatively, ‘and I don’t think it’s in the book.’

The Doctor sighed. ‘Play on. I’m sure it will come back to me.’ Mildeo fast-forwarded some more. ‘This is where the merriment really begins.’

‘We’re about to enter the creature’s chamber now,’ said Schneider’s voice from off screen. The camera seemed to be pointing at a grey wall until they rounded a corner.

‘Here it is,’ said Schneider flatly.

‘Oh my!’ said the Doctor, examining the creature on the screen. ‘A Shoggoth.’

Mildeo coughed. ‘As you can see, we have substantial filmic evi-dence here of the Elder Things’ existence: their city under the Antarc-tic ice, the Elder Runes on the walls, even footage of one of their servitors, the uncanny, nay eldritch, Shoggoths. Protoplasmic masses capable of taking on any form.’

‘Yes yes yes,’ said the Doctor, jumping to his feet and rubbing his brow. ‘All very persuasive, if it wasn’t entirely impossible. I’m very much afraid we’ll have to go and see that city for ourselves.’

‘What, join the expedition?’ asked Fitz, visions of the great explor-ers he read about as a boy flitting through his mind. Scott, Amundsen, Howberry and now Kreiner.

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No, better to go back to when the place was inhabited. We’ll just pop in for tea and currant buns.’

Hume tapped a samba beat on the metal struts of the helicopter. It was even more cramped than the plane had been five hours before. Cold metal and burning engines, a machine of war. It was like coming home.

Machholtz’s and Encke’s comets hung in the sky like flaming em-bers. One alone would have sufficed to foretell the death of princes. He really couldn’t remember now above the scream of the rotor blades whether either of them ever had.

They had flown from Cape Horn across the South Shetland Islands and up the Antarctic Peninsula towards the heart of the British Ter-ritory. Over the peninsula it had drizzled, the last liquid water this side of the Pole. Ninety per cent of the world’s ice lay ahead of them: seventy per cent of the world’s fresh water, locked down solid. Along the way they had collected a squad of soldiers and a small group of scientists, enough to fill two medium-sized helicopters. Hume – the name was as good as any other – wasn’t sufficiently well versed in con-temporary avionics to recognise the type straight off, but some of the internal controls were labelled in the Russian alphabet. Cramped to-gether, the scientists shoehorned into ‘his’ ’copter had seemed friendly enough, and one, an attractive dark-haired girl who looked barely a graduate, had pressed her leg gently against his. A gesture that he had enjoyed for a moment as a purely accidental human contact, before he had moved away.

Her face had quirked to a tiny smile at that. He had wondered what they had been told about him. Probably just the usual cover stories. First-contact specialist. High-IQ loner, good agent, on a long leash, quirky but efficient, often blessed with remarkable hunches. Talented with languages. The half of it. The quarter of it, all things considered. For a time he had watched the relatively ice-free browns and greys of the peninsula give way to ice sheets, and the rain turn to sleet, until the peaks of the Vinson Massif, black and ragged, rising naked above the ice line on the horizon, had made him long for the comforts of

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backstreet Buenos Aires.

He must have been dozing when it happened.

Jessup sat, cross-legged, before the creature. The medics had come to take the dark-eyed girl away, averting their gaze from the beast that had given her to them. Apparently UNIT had plucked one of their experts out of retirement and sent him on his way. That had been hours ago.

Schneider had recommended Jessup stay the hell away from the creature, and he had spent most of the last few hours in other parts of the complex, doing the standard archaeological stuff. Now he’d come back, to taste the creature’s pain again. He hoped it wasn’t a case of him developing a taste for S and M, this desire to commune with such agony.

He could feel tendrils of emotion touching his mind, the same feel-ings of betrayal and despair. Then there was something new. Recog-nition. Fear.

Jessup grimaced at the feelings. Something was coming, the crea-ture could feel it. Something familiar, something hated.

Jessup could swear he heard the sound of distant thunder. He saw tendrils of greenish energy shoot out of the creature, flowing through the ceiling, presumably heading towards the surface. Jessup felt the creature’s desire for vengeance. He pitied who or what was on the other end of that attack.

The forward ’copter bought it as the motors cut out heading dead south over the foothills of the Massif, in a wash of green flame. Hume imagined faces cold-sealed to the glass, reflecting the sickly aurora in their eyes as their corpses froze on impact, shards of rotor blades scything into powdered static.

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the so-calledakan’je, coalescence of certain vowels outside of stress. Hume wasn’t minded to ask which. He had about thirty seconds be-fore they were all dead.

Ten seconds later, they had spiralled down, gliding with the rotors turning free like an autogyro. Hume knew he had a hero-worshipper on his hands. The pilot was nearly drooling over the flying, muttering that he hadn’t even known that manoeuvre was possible with a troop transport. That was unfortunate. Out of the corner of his eye Hume thought he saw a string of domes on the ground below. Damn, they were near. Then the impact crushed his ribcage against the controls and everything went up in the magnesium flare of the crash. His last thought was that the landing hadn’t been worthy of him after all.

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Chapter Three

Neither now nor then, neither up nor down. Breezily unaware of any possible hostility in its environment, a blue wooden box tumbled unscathed through the endless chaos of the space-time vortex. It was a box made from numbers, complex equations forming its wooden slats and glass panels, the sign on the top which read POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX.

Inside the box lay a small universe – opinions differed as to the meaning of ‘small’ in such a context – a microcosm block-transferred from mathematics itself. A living beast of time calculations and trans-dimensional equations, designed to relate to its pilot via a symbiotic bond woven into that pilot’s very being. This was how the Time Lords of Gallifrey commanded their ships – TARDISes like this blue box.

However, the person who had engineered this TARDIS had fitted some subtle amendments to the basic design. Several sections of the ship were not block transfers at all but were built from actual mate-rials from the real universe rather than dreamed out of the minds of Gallifrey’s mathematicians. These areas could bypass the symbiotic relationship, allowing a physical, nuts-and-bolts approach to control-ling the ship. Why a Time Lord should do such a thing, equipping such an exotic and sophisticated machine with crude manual controls, who could tell? Perhaps the ship’s owner had become wary of overreliance on super-technologies. Perhaps he wished the TARDIS to be usable by a non-Gallifreyan, though such egalitarian thoughts rarely occurred to the Time Lords in their arrogant solitude.

Perhaps he just liked to drive occasionally to give the TARDIS a chance to take in the view.

Whatever the reason, in one such area of the TARDIS the ship’s current pilot and crew were gathered.

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The Doctor slapped his forehead. ‘Mictlan!’ he exclaimed. He leaned against the wooden panels of the central console, shaking his head at the sluggishness of his own thought processes.

‘Pardon?’ asked Fitz, slumped in a wicker chair.

‘Mictlan,’ repeated the Doctor. ‘Home of the Celestis, a rather un-pleasant offshoot of my own civilisation. I knew I’d seen a device like that somewhere before. Unearthly materials, fingers of bone; Mictlan was full of that kind of tacky ornamentation. Biomechanical DIY is one of the first signs of a paranoid megalomaniac culture. The nat-ural body being despised and feared is projected externally as other than the self, thereby justifying the abuse of it in others. At least that’s what Adler thought when he wasn’t playing the mouth organ.’

‘What?’ Fitz said.

‘The Doctor is purporting to confuse one of the three founders of Earthly psychology with a fourth-rate musician,’ Compassion ex-plained cattily. ‘I suppose it is intended to be amusing, which im-plies –’

‘Trouble,’ Fitz said moodily.

‘The Celestis left this universe to avoid a war in my people’s own fu-ture,’ said the Doctor. ‘They built themselves their own mini-universe, Mictlan, as a new home. Making a fictional species like the Elder Things would be child’s play by comparison. What worries me is why. Why come out of seclusion and start throwing their technol-ogy around, interfering in the timelines of a fragile temporal focus like Earth? The Celestis expended a lot of effort putting the universe behind them, and whatever caused them to renew their involvement must be very big.’

‘How big?’ asked Compassion.

The Doctor sucked a finger. ‘Oh, pretty big. For the Celestis, the death of galaxies would be a trivial distraction.’

Three minutes to impact.

The art of distraction is that of hiding a small detail in a big mess. The infiltration capsule did this, skimming the surface of space-time, leaving confusing ripples and patterns across the continua. Its

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tinct, ghostly presence streaked across billions of miles and hundreds of years as it approached its destination. Its point of impact would indistinguishable from any other part of the time spectrum.

Two minutes and thirty seconds to impact.

Xenaria dragged herself upright, feeling the strength and breadth of her new form. The walls of the infiltration capsule seemed insubstan-tial now as they approached their destination, unnecessary equipment being shed and discarded in the vortex. The strike force would be spat out naked into real-space, no evidence of their method of arrival re-maining.

Xenaria staggered, unsteady on her five base tentacles. Her long ribbed form stretched, tubular veined wings unfolding almost ecstat-ically along her sides. Tricky, but not unlike the crab legs of her pre-vious form. The twelve members of her strike force were also flexing their new limbs, fitting appropriately customised weapons and equip-ment to their bodies. Although they all looked roughly the same, Xe-naria’s natural instinct to recognise members of her species regardless of appearance allowed her to tell them apart.

One was instantly recognisable just by the meticulous manner in which he examined the weapons pod attached beneath one wing, which he inspected with studious intensity. Such dedication ought to have been admirable, but somehow it wasn’t.

‘Allopta,’ Xenaria addressed him, her own voice strange to her as it boomed out on a deep bass level below human speech. Allopta heard her nonetheless, and glided towards her.

Two minutes to impact.

‘Commander,’ Allopta replied. The capsule was juddering now, ready for break-up.

The excitement of imminent battle rippled through the older mem-bers of the strike force, the veterans. There was tension among the handful of newborns drafted in after the heavy losses of the Third Zone fiasco. Best not to waste them.

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Allopta nodded, a strange dipping of his tendrilled head – crap body language, signalling poor control of his new form – then turned to the newborns. ‘Recruits, with me,’ he barked.

Xenaria turned to the other five, who were better at disguising any nerves. Fully equipped, flexing their bodies in measured motions, they were veterans of a dozen campaigns against the most implacable and deadly opponents. All the conscript species the enemy had co-opted.

They would have to do.

One minute and thirty seconds to impact.

Xenaria mentally ran through the inventory of the forthcoming mis-sion. The first step was infiltration: eliminating the target species and slipping into their timelines, thereby disguising the rest of the operation from enemy detection. The second step was information retrieval: obtaining the target species’ records concerning Planet 5, preparing strategies for the final stage. The subcommittee who had authorised the mission had briefly considered Mars as a suitable plat-form for the attack on Planet 5, but its advantages in terms of prox-imity were outweighed by the difficulties inherent in trying to hide a strike force in a devastated wasteland inhabited by a few bunches of reptiles. Earth offered more.

One minute to impact.

The final stage of the operation would be the hardest. The recovery mission to Planet 5, itself.

It was a suicide mission. They had joined knowing the chances of their return, of survival, were unimaginably low. They were dealing with something beyond death. So be it.

Thirty seconds to impact.

The capsule was translucent now, slowing down both its geographi-cal and temporal approach. Outside, thick jungle whipped past them, the flora of a planet in its primeval stages.

‘Brace yourselves,’ Xenaria bellowed over the cacophony of the im-pending real-world interface.

Impact.

The capsule was gone and they were in the real world. There was no sense of landing, just a crunching inertia, the internal lurch of

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gravity exerting itself as they materialised in a verdant forest, sending various bugs scurrying for shelter. Xenaria filtered the air through her breathing clusters – clean, unpolluted, so different from the thick black smoke of her own world. A pre-industrial air that didn’t know the environmental horrors of weapon construction. The sky above was a blazing fire, and she swivelled her five red eyes looking for a source. The energy seemed to come from everywhere. She dismissed the point as an irrelevance, shaking the thought from her tendrilled head. This was a staging point, nothing more.

‘Tachon?’ she barked.

Her navigation expert tried a salute with his tentacles and failed abysmally, settling for a faint flutter of their fractal endings, as he compared incoming data to the mission briefing. ‘Drop zone as in-structed,’ Tachon intoned. ‘We’re here. Target base only a couple of clicks ahead.’

‘Very well,’ said Xenaria, raising herself up. ‘Primary team, prepare to attack.’

Xenaria and her primary team intercepted members of the target species close to their base; it was as if the Elder Things were expecting them. Nevertheless, the targets didn’t attack first. Paltek fired the first shot, a thick beam of plasma ripping through the body of one of the targets. It split open without a sound, fleshy body exploding in a rain of tendrils and ichor. Its companions remained impassive, retreating slightly, but showing no evident concern at the death of one of their own kind.

Then the battle began in earnest. Two of the other targets raised their tentacles aloft, drawing down lilac-tinged fire from the sky. Some kind of neurally activated gravity disruption, Xenaria guessed. The clouds opened up, and as Paltek, one of Xenaria’s longest-serving lieutenants, was torn to pieces by unnatural fires, Xenaria felt the rain drip down her alien body like heavy tears.

Her response was immediate and violent.